Pros
Took away leadership skills that I wouldn't have gotten in any other entry level position. I now possess the confidence of a business owner. You are trained to really analyze your business from the ground up (i.e. learning how to execute a grassroots marketing campaign, profit gain/loss, labor hour projection). I now understand that the importance of building a relationship with my clients and interns goes way beyond just sales and profit. This is truly a humanizing and humbling experience and will set you apart from the rest of the crowd when you're applying for your dream job in the future. You don't need any experience to start out and the company offers great promotional benefits. You have plenty of opportunities to travel as a district manager. The training opportunities are also very in depth and after applying your knowledge in the field, you can transfer these skills into any industry.
Cons
Despite my positive review above, I cannot rate this company more than two stars, simply because I felt that my VP when I was a DM was not mentally 'all in' and could not provide the proper support for his team of managers. In hindsight, I wish I would not have been promoted to be a DM as I severely lacked sales experience to support my interns, but I was promoted anyways because I possessed great work ethic and grit. During recruiting season, I did exceptionally well and met my goals that I had set with my VP. I hired amazing interns and was excited for what the spring and summer could bring. However, 3-4 weeks into launching my interns' sales/marketing careers and doing estimates, my booking rate was the lowest in the nation. I have reached out to my VP on almost a daily basis during recruiting and training season to receive one on one training to refine my sales skills, as I was falling behind incrementally on a weekly basis in comparison to my teammates and to the national average, but was always met with ignored calls and meetings that would either be constantly pushed back, or just plain out cancelled. My VP would fail to deliver on promises to let me shadow an estimate with him or to listen in on him doing lead conversion calls, as part of the issues was also in my lead conversion. I understand VP's of this company are incredibly busy managing multi million dollar divisions and cannot offer assistance to their 20-30 DMs. However, my VP only had 3-4 managers by March with less than 15-20 interns, and there was no sense of urgency on the VP's part to focus on his team. Our division was a wreck and ended up falling apart after the summer ended. I ended up leaving the company during the middle of sales season because of the stress from not being able to produce results for my interns and not seeing results from my efforts. My confidence was at an all time low and it took me months to get myself out of that rut.
